Tin­sel­town wakes up to spin yarns of the web

It’s taken a while, but Hollywood fi­nally seems to have wo­ken up to this in­ter­net thing. As noted in to­day’s au­tumn movie pre­view (pages 4 to 6), two ma­jor re­leases fo­cus­ing on web pi­o­neers are on their way. David Fincher’s The So­cial Net­work ad­dresses the rise of Face­book and the craze for so­cial net­work­ing. In a seed­ier vein, Ge­orge Gallo’s Mid­dle Men con­cerns it­self with the early days of in­ter­net pornog­ra­phy.

Now, it emerges that Ken Auletta’s book Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, a study of the most un­avoid­able of search en­gines, is to be made into a film by pro­ducer John Mor­ris. The ful­crum of the story will be the re­la­tion­ship be­tween Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two boffins who de­vised Google while still at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity.

The So­cial Net­work has al­ready scared up some con­tro­versy. Sources at Face­book sug­gest that Mark Zucker­berg, founder of the firm, is queasy about some of the changes made to his life story. A New York Times story pon­dered dilem­mas faced by pro­ducer Scott Rudin. “As of this week, Mr Rudin said, one re­main­ing ques­tion was to what ex­tent the fin­ished film would in­clude a scene that de­picted Sean Parker, the Nap­ster co-founder who was heav­ily in­volved with Face­book’s early his­tory, de­liv­er­ing his di­a­logue while a pair of teenage girls of­fer par­ty­go­ers lines of co­caine from bared breasts.” Zucker­berg and Parker re­mem­ber it dif­fer­ently.